1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a storage medium, which converts a photographic image into a painting image in accordance with an emphasis of regions which form image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, people have enjoyed photographs in increasingly various ways, with spread of digital cameras. In particular, since image data of digital cameras are digital image data, various image processing can be performed.
For example, a technique of generating and displaying an image featuring a different tone (such as a painting image) based on an original photograph, by adding image processing to the original photograph, has been proposed (for example, see Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 8-44867).
By developing the technique of Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 8-44867, it has been proposed to extract characteristics such as color information and stroke information from an image of a picture which is actually drawn by a painter, providing a taken photograph with the extracted characteristics, and thereby converting the photograph into an artistic painting image in consideration of the whole original image (for example, see Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2004-213598).
Besides, a technique of converting the photograph by changing the image tone such as pictorial tone has been proposed (for example, see Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKOU Publication No. 1-46905).
In addition, it has been proposed to perform tone change such as pictorial tone in a network service site, to which a terminal can be connected through the Internet (for example, see Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2011-243187).
However, when a photograph is converted into a painting image, the photograph includes an emphasis region such as a center part and a face, and a region which is not very important such as a peripheral part. In addition, the emphasis region is not only a face and a center part, but may be a central subject which the user wishes to take, such as a car and a flower. Specifically, it is desirable to emphasize the emphasis region in the converted image, specifically, differentiate the emphasis region in appearance from the other region. The techniques of prior art, however, have the problem that the whole photograph is uniformly converted.